Banners (by Titia)

A Banner: according to Wikipedia: a flag or other piece of cloth bearing a symbol, logo, slogan or other message.

The original banner was made of cloth, but on the internet we use the word "banner" if we refer to certain images made of pixels.
There are several kinds of banners. The most known on the net are advertising banners. Screamy images that try to attract our attention in order to click on it, so we can be lured to another webpage.
The banner we speak of, has another goal: building brand awareness. That is also an important bannerfunction.

....maybe it would be a good idea if people with their own site, would use the banner to create a link to this site...

In this case I think we better can call the banner: "a page header", or simply "header".
A page header in typography appears on the top of a page, it is separated from the main body of text and is often the same every page.
It ties all the pages together as a kind of book. You can instantly see where the page belongs to.

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But what is in the name? We only try to create an image for fun and not professional, but I think we all want too make it look good.
I want to give you some guidelines for designing this specific banner or header.
First of all: in creativity there are no rules, so every guideline I give is no rule, it can always give wonderful results if you try something opposite.

The fractalforum image is 731 X 102 pixels. This is not a usual proportion for an image. So, it is not likely you just can take a ready-to-use image. At least you have to adapt it.
It is an horizontal image, an horizontal design would be best.

The fractalforum image musn't be screamy. It is not meant to attract all the attention. The site is mainly informative, so it must be there, but a bit on the background. Professionals use a "housestyle". In this case you can say the housestyle uses the colors black-white-blue.
Minimize the colors, to black-white and blue (or use soft colors, tones).

The fractalforums image must show what kind of site it is. Mainly informative. So, it isn't a good idea to create a wild image. It is about fractals. There are many sorts of fractalimages, but the best fractalimages are those which everyone recognizes as fractals.
A simple, clean and clear fractalimage would be best.

The fractalforums image looks best if it blends in the background -this is a personal view-, but look at the rest of the page anyway, not just at the banner/header.
How does the complete picture look?

The fractalforums image uses a specified font. The text contains the name and the slogan. It goes too far to tell much about that, but there is a thing to consider: the usual reader in the west is used to read from the left to the right. This is not an artsy site, the first place where people begin to read is on the left.
The best place for the text is on the left, maybe in the middle.

As told before: creativity has no boundaries, but maybe this helps a bit to design a new banner/header.